Although we are in 2013 since almost a month, the MSX-BASIC 2012 Contest organized by Konamito.com is still alive …. Actually, due to concurrence of other challenges, the deadline has been delayed to 28 February 2013 23:59 Canary Islands Zone (UTC) !

Knights & Demons is a puzzle-game, created by Kabuto Factory, a brand new Spanish team and that’s the 1st entry to this contest. In this nice game, the goal is to defeat the evil forces by replacing the dangerous demons by brave knights ! Three difficulty levels to prove your skills !

This game is provided in CAS format and a corrupted ASCII version of the BAS file is also available (problem with MSX Taper). Here’s the good procedure to create the DSK and ROM versions :
- create a blank DSK image with Disk Manager
- insert the DSK file in the virtual A drive of blueMSX
- insert the CAS file in the virtual tape port of blueMSX
- launch blueMSX (MSX1, 2 or 2+ machine) and press CTRL while booting
- enter LOAD”CAS:”
- save the file normally on DSK by SAVE “KD.BAS”
- create an AUTOEXEC.BAS to launch KD.BAS
- close blueMSX
- use ROM Creator to transform KD.BAS into KD.ROM

Between July 2008 and June 2010, the Passion MSX website has organized two editions of a contest to promote the creation of new MSX2 games. Something very similar to the MSXdev’ contest, don’t you think ?! It has provided 4 games, 2 per edition. We have just added these games to the Other section.

Besides the games, you will also find the results of the contests. If the winner of the 1st edition was already known, it was not the case for the second edition. Due to different problems, these results had been delayed. Finally, they are here, on this website, especially because Passion MSX is no more active and as his “follower”, I mean the MSX blue website, is no interested in the launching of an eventual 3rd edition. The prizes of the 2nd edition will soon be sent to the developers.

Time to present another game created by Sherif Hashem aka sherif_hashim and shared with the MSX community ! Invaders from the space have been always a theme for the inspiration of many coders. The amazing thing here is the fact that the game is entirely in MSX-BASIC with measure to neutralize automatic shooting ! Of course, there are different attacking waves of aliens and the difficulty level increases with each wave !

After some discussions with the coder, we have removed Night Escape from the MSXdev’11 contest and transferred it to the Other section.

There was some kind of misunderstanding. The intention of Sherif Hashem aka sherif_hashim was not to participate to the famous MSX challenge, but to share with the MSX community his games created in BASIC between 1984 and 1987. He’s now very busy with his professionnal activities and his hobbies, but thinks that sharing his old MSX works on a nice website (thanks for this appreciation !) is a good idea. So, you can expect that more games will extend the Other section, reserved for games published for other contests or outside any contest. Even in BASIC games, we think that experienced coders can find inspiration for more advanced games !!!

Sherif Hashem wants also to answer to the critics seen on the MSX Resource Center about the presumed non-originality of Night Escape, and, beyond that, the status of all his games. We have indeed received a second game that we’ll release soon. It includes many REM lines without any content, so he has also answered about that. Here’s this answer :

“All these games actually I had on an old notebook written by my own hands in basic between the years of 1984-1987, I already had many games and programs that sure have been modified thru basic books and added/changed/modified the idea/graphics, so I m really not sure which of these games has been modified by me and which has been written from the scratch, but definitely I had learnt and used many many books by this time , but the 1000% sure thing is that nothing of these games was copied as it is from a source, and all of them has at least 50-60% changes either in the idea, graphics, music and more. Even regarding these rem lines according to what I remember, they are usually due to change in the way of reading the sprites data (repeated lines instead of using a for-next loop) or due to change in the input of the control keys ( chr$ vs asc() ) inputs, or sometimes a change in the instruction screens which I used to insert very often by this time ( if something bad was meant I would have sure removed that lines) :))”

So, it means that we can enjoy these games without any problem, as they are not aimed to be part of the MSXdev’11 challenge ! More games, more fun … It’s the slogan that we must keep always in our hearts and in our minds !!!